Some fresh ideas for getting blog subscribers

There are three critical things to examine if you’re trying to grow your blog: how to get new visitors to your blog; how you can convert those visitors to subscribers; and how you can get those subscribers to share your content, to attract a new audience. Subscribers are vital to the success of a blog – pouring loads of time into creating fantastic blogs is good, but if not many people are seeing them, you’ll never get the kind of business results you need.

Obviously, you need to post new blogs frequently and consistently, but here are some fresh ideas for attracting news subscribers to your blog.

Optimise your top performing blog for subscriptions.

Your top blog posts (use your analytics to determine your top performers) gather a lot more traffic than your average post, so optimising them for subscriptions makes a lot of sense. Add a smart CTA to the post, or try a number of tactics and see what works best with your audience.

Offer an incentive to new subscribers

An eBook, discount or free course when subscribing is a real win – there’s not many people who don’t want something for free. You do, however, need to keep an eye on the engagement rates of your emails, to ensure your offer is bringing in quality subscribers, not just people signing up for the offer, who are not really interested in your content.

Add an opt-in box to your landing pages

This is an easy way to capture new subscribers, since there is already interest (the person is on your landing page already). A clear subscribe box or button makes it really easy, and if you have a number of landing pages, the benefit is increased.

Remove distractions and put your CTAs where they will be seen

Side bars on blogs can be a distraction that lessen your chances of subscriptions. Look at your website carefully to determine what could be diverting your audience attention away from the subscriber CTA. It’s a good idea to test conversion rates with and without the side bar, to track to difference. Google recently removed side bar ads to improve user experience. You can also use more than one CTA – one in your blog header which is constant, regardless of which blog or subject your reader is on; and another at the bottom of the post.

Offer a course

The perceived value of a course is significantly higher than that of an eBook, so offering an email course can be a very effective method of increasing subscribers. Obviously, creating a course from scratch is very time consuming and could be costly, if you have to get outside help. The course needs to be high quality, which means a flawless user experience, great design and actionable content. You can recycle your old content, by cleaning it up and making it more relevant. Once you’ve got it done, you can advertise your course on social media and send an email to subscribers to let them know it’s coming. Adding a ‘limited time’ aspect is also a good way to get fast results.

Getting subscribers is not that difficult, but it does require a strategy and persistence. Sometimes, it goes back to just asking nicely – no one wants to be coerced into subscribing, so don’t bully people into it. Keeping your tone friendly and polite can be the key to gaining a steadily growing, loyal list. For more on blogs and email marketing, contact us. We might have a few more suggestions up our sleeves…